You’d think that a rather uncommon last name like “Wight” would be a relatively easy name for others to spell correctly. It is uncommon enough that I’ve never met any other Wights outside of “my family“. And yet people seem to have trouble with it. People seem to think that it should be spelled more conventionally as “White”, or maybe with an extra “R” as “Wright”, or they wrongly spell it “Right”.
As anyone with a rather uncommon name can probably attest to, you just have to get used to people spelling or pronouncing your name incorrectly. Of course you can do your best to correct mistakes; back home I used to always say “Like the Isle of Wight” to help prevent error, but here in the USA that isn’t really so useful. My wife still gets annoyed at people spelling her last name incorrectly, but I’ve long gotten past that. Most people are happy to fix their errors when corrected and rarely make the same mistake more than once.
And of course there is occasional humour in someone intentionally misspelling or mispronouncing your name. Being referred to as “Jonathan Widget” never gets old. No really, it never gets old. Honest.
And still there are a plethora of alternative spellings for Jonathan too (all of them inferior of course) with “Jonathon” and “Johnathan” being perhaps the most common alternatives. But of course you pick your battles.
You’d think on the internet these mistakes would be less common. You certainly can’t blame these mistakes on mishearing the name. Generally the name is there, in ASCII form for you to see (or copy & paste), clear as day. But of course mistakes happen. On more than one occasion I have been confused online with Jonathan Wright, apparently an AI programmer at id Software. I would to think that Jonathan Wright has been mistaken for me in return. During a recent interview about Ironcoder I was quoted as “Jason Wright”, go figure.
It would take a special kind of Internet idiot to misspell a name more than say, a dozen times…